Mike Huckabee Slams 'Amateurish' Obama On Tax Cut Negotiations

Mike Huckabee recently criticized President Obama for what the former Arkansas Governor and potential GOP presidential candidate characterized as "amateurish" behavior last week in his press conference announcing the deal he had reached with Republicans on extending the Bush tax cuts.

"The most bizarre part of the whole process was watching President Obama self-destruct at the podium," Huckabee told the National Journal in a recent interview. "I was just stunned -- I really couldn't believe that a man that was elected president was as amateurish as he was, and essentially launched from the podium at some of his own, taking aim and mowing down everybody in D.C. and walking away having not understood that he just lost a lot of people."

At the briefing last week, President Obama castigated both Republican "hostage takers," whom he said had been willing to place the economic interests of the wealthiest Americans above those of the middle class and unemployed, as well as "purist" Democrats, whom he said would have preferred him to make a more ideological -- and in his view unrealistic -- stand on the issue.

Huckabee's analysis of Obama's tax cut deal, which most notably would allow the wealthiest two percent of income earners in the United States to keep their current tax rates for the next two years in return for a 13-month reauthorization of unemployment benefits, reached beyond insulting the president's conduct, however.

"I was shocked it was going to be two not three [years], because it puts this whole thing in the very center, the bull's-eye of the 2012 presidential election," Huckabee said. "It doesn't have it resolved."

Which could be exactly the way Huckabee wants it if he is planning to run against Obama in 2012, a possibility that he told the National Journal he was still weighing.